Musing about my five collecting interests: all things Orioles, 50's Baseball, team publications, Japanese cards and even some football and hockey.
You might find some beautiful women, soccer stuff, presidential pins and life advice from time to time. I don't charge extra for any of those.

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Topps Never Stops.....

....figuring ways to separate collectors from their cash. Latest example is this five card 'set' that I was given as a late Father's Day gift.

This is a 'wax' wrapper that contained five Orioles 5x7 cards of their current stars done more of less in the style of the 1955 set.

A word here about Topps in general and the set in particular.. the '55 set isn't my favorite of the decade, not by a long shot. But it does have it's charms. And these are certainly attractive cards. I understand there are larger individual prints of these also being sold. I got on the Topps mailing list and if I paid any attention to their frequent emails I'd probably know more.

I suppose asking if there is a point to these types of things other than to make a few dollars would be stupid. Making dollars IS the point. And they sold at least one set of the Orioles.

Here are the cards, and looking at them again brings up something else. Haven't we seen all these photos before. I have very little 'contact' with current sets but these all look very familiar.

Anyway, here they are:

Just for the sake of comparing and contrasting here is an original '55, Orioles lefty Billy O'Dell.

And finally, if you use Google to store your images maybe you've found something like this in your folders:

I had scanned a whole pile of the '68 Topps game inserts and this set and when I did a mass upload weird stuff was happening. I thought my scanner had flipped out on me. But I poked around and found that Google somehow makes these animated gifs out of multiple pictures whether you ask it to or not. Google is starting to take over the world and it's scaring me.

14 comments:

I was mainly curious to see how the Orioles set compared to the Phillies set that The Phillies Room had shared a bit of earlier in the week:http://thephilliesroom.blogspot.com/2014/06/2014-topps-philadelphia-phillies-60th.html

I know I've complained in the past about Topps pretty well ignoring my Milwaukee Brewers in sets like Archives, but this is a time I'm glad that they have left out Milwaukee. I'd feel compelled to buy something like this if they made one for Milwaukee...well, maybe I'd buy it...but thankfully 97% of the cards from the collection are Mets, Red Sox, or Yankees! :-)

That said, they are pretty attractive cards. How are you going to display them (assuming you are)?

Odd thing is I bought a bought one of Topps' Brooks Robinson wall art posters and just now framed it and put it on the wall in my office. I don't have a lot of wall space available. I might buy a couple plastic frames and rotate the cards in them from time to time.

It seems that these are considered "prints" not "cards" in legalese, so Topps is allowed to feature Wieters. At least that's what the Twitter card industry people in the know say. I'm assuming the backs are blank.

I considered picking up the A's pack... but ended up grabbing the Major League pack instead. I wish they had gone with legends, instead of current players. No offense to the current Athletics, but I'd much rather see a print of Rickey Henderson than Josh Donaldson.